‘Fantastic Four’ Producer Says There Could Still Be a Sequel Somehow

The Fantastic Four movie stunk. Perhaps you heard about it. Fox attempted to reboot Marvel’s First Family with a younger cast, a darker tone, and a buzzy young director (Chronicle’s Josh Trank). The finished product was a baffling, ugly mess. It made just $167 million worldwide, way less than either of the Fantastic Four movies that had come before it, earned some of the worst reviews of 2015, and won (“won”) three Razzie Awards, including Worst Director for Trank and Worst Picture.

Now call me crazy, but when all that happens, I would argue the time is perhaps not ideal for a sequel. If an audience rejects something so thoroughly then the best thing to do is just to let the thing lay dormant for a while. If you are going to try again, maybe do it with a totally new creative team, and a new cast, and just get as far as you can from the thing that made garnered all the excitement of a sewage leak.

But what do I know? I’m just a dope writing about movies on the internet. And it sounds like a Fantastic Four sequel is still a definite possibility. Speaking with Den of Geek, Fantastic Four and X-Men producer Simon Kinberg said:

“We want to make another Fantastic Four movie. We love that cast - I mean if I were to say to you now Michael B. Jordan and Miles Teller, and Kate [Mara] and Jamie [Bell] are great actors - we love that cast. I love the comic. I mean I love it almost as much as X-Men.”

Mmhmm kay. And what, pray tell, would this FF sequel look like? Would it also feature no costumes and be set mostly in bunkers, with the team largely hating each other while performing clandestine black ops work for the government?

“We’ll try to be truer to the essence of the tone of Fantastic Four, which is completely... distinct from the X-Men, which is brighter, funner, more optimistic tone. I think we tried to make a darker Fantastic Four movie, which seemed like a radical idea but we were kind of messing with the DNA of the actual comic.”

Of course, the whole thinking behind the last movie was “We want to make a different Fantastic Four movie. We want to make it gritty and real and grounded!” And then the audience hated it. Suddenly it’s “jk jk jk we want to do it again, only just like the comic.”

Wanting to make another movie and actually doing it are two very different things. Given the absolute disaster of the last one, I’d be surprised if Fox did anything with Fantastic Four for a while. But then again, a lot of these licensing deals for comic book movies lapse if they’re not exercised constantly. So maybe Kinberg will get his sequel after all. All this one has to do is make $168 million and only win two Razzie Awards and it’s already an improvement over the last one.